Melissa Gentry: From Seneca Falls to Seymour and South Bend: Mapping Indiana’s Suffrage History

On close inspection, story maps reveal that Indiana—and Hoosier suffragists in particular—were ideologically, economically, racially, and socially diverse. Melissa’s multimedia story maps depict some of the people and places connected to the history of women’s suffrage. Complete with ups, downs, sometimes dramatic and “less than ladylike” but always colorful individuals and events, her talk incorporates historic photographs, correspondence, diaries, club minutes, oral histories, movies, newspapers, music, and artwork from the collections of Ball State University. With these sources, she introduces national and Hoosier women suffragists like Ida Husted Harper, Madam CJ Walker, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott while highlighting Hoosier cities connected to the local and national suffrage movements.

Melissa Gentry is the Map Collection Supervisor at the Ball State University Libraries’ GIS Research and Map Collection, where she provides instruction programs and curates special exhibits at Ball State University and the Muncie community. Since 2008, Melissa has been a featured instructor for the Cornerstone Center for the Arts, providing workshops/programs for Black, Women’s, and Native American History Months and other topics. Furthermore, she presented a women’s history session for the Hoosier Women at Work Conference in 2018, the Indiana Association of Historians in 2019, and the Midwestern History Conference in 2018. She is included in the Library of Congress Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission database and credits her interest in women’s history to her grandmother, who worked for Indiana Senator Birch Bayh during his legislative battles for Title IX and the ERA.